Formulas and the Building Blocks of Ṭhumrī Style—A Study in “Improvised” Music Chloe Zadeh PART I: IMPROVISATION, STRUCTURE AND FORMULAS IN NORTH INDIAN CLASSICAL MUSIC usicians, musicologists and teenage backpackers alike speak of “improvisation” in M modern-day Indian classical music.1 Musicians use the term to draw attention to differences between different portions of a performance, distinguishing between the “composition” of a particular performance (in vocal music, a short melody, setting a couple of lines of lyrics) and the rest of the performance, which involves musical material that is different in each performance and that musicians often claim to have made up on the spur of the moment.2 In their article “Improvisation in Iranian and Indian music,” Richard Widdess and Laudan Nooshin draw attention to modern-day Indian terminology which reflects a conceptual distinction between improvised and pre-composed sections of a performance (2006, 2–4). The concept of improvisation has also been central to Western imaginings of North Indian classical music in the twentieth century. John Napier has discussed the long history of Western descriptions of Indian music as “improvised” or “extemporized,” which he dates back to the work of Fox Strangways in 1914. He points out the importance the concept took on, for example, in the way in which Indian music was introduced to mainstream Western audiences in the 1960s; he notes that the belief that the performance of Indian music 1 I am very grateful to Richard Widdess and Peter Manuel for their comments on draft versions of this article. 2 The relationship between those parts of the performance that musicians label the “composition” and the rest of the performance is actually slightly more complicated than this; throughout, a performance of North Indian classical music is normally punctuated by a refrain, or mukhra, which is a part of the composition. Even apparently improvised parts of the performance may also make extensive use of material that is derived from the composition. Formulas and the Building Blocks of Ṭhumrī Style constituted an improvised, meditative act allowed Indian music to become “a metaphor for a particular kind of psychic or spiritual freedom” (2006, 3). The term “improvisation” evokes ideas of spontaneity and freedom; it would seem antithetical to the idea of a carefully worked-out and pre-planned structure. These connotations, however, are potentially misleading when the term is used in an Indian classical context.3 Contrasting with the idea of whimsical freedom that the word “improvisation” evokes, a number of scholars have drawn attention to ways in which performances in the North Indian classical tradition are highly structured. John Napier, for example, is highly critical of some of the “misunderstandings” that arise from Western audiences’ impressions of North Indian classical music as improvised. He is suspicious of what he calls a “crude racialization,” which, he feels, leads some to view Indian music as “structurally deficient.” In contrast with this view, he has identified what he calls a process of “intensification” in North Indian classical music; this structures performances such that they normally start slowly and in a low register, becoming increasingly fast, complex and exploring ever higher pitches as the performance progresses (2006, 5). Similarly, in their discussion of improvisation in Indian music, Widdess and Nooshin have drawn attention to “fundamental processes of development” and “compositional principles” that structure North Indian classical music (2006, 7–8). One of these is vistār, a structural principle which occurs throughout North Indian classical music. Vistār is one part of Napier’s “intensification” and is the process in 3 It is not only in studies of North Indian classical music that scholars have pointed to the problems inherent in the use of the concept of “improvisation” to make sense of different types of music. Bruno Nettl (1974) has critiqued the conventional opposition between composition and improvisation, suggesting that they would better be modeled as opposite poles of a spectrum, on which most musical traditions sit somewhere in the middle, involving a combination of pre-planned and spontaneous musical events. Moreover, Laudan Nooshin (2003) has discussed the political implications of the discursive distinction between improvisation and composition, suggesting ways in which it is informed by a Western, orientalist ideology. 2 Analytical Approaches To World Music 2.1 (2012) which musicians gradually introduce the rāg of the performance to their audiences, by focusing on successively higher (and sometimes lower) pitches in turn (2006, 7).4 Elsewhere, Widdess draws upon theories of cognitive schemas in order to make sense of how some of these “compositional principles” operate in North Indian classical music. A schema is a memory structure. In a discussion of schemas and music in his book Music and Memory, Bob Snyder defines it as follows: “When a number of different situations occurring at different times seem to have aspects in common, they are eventually averaged together into an abstract memory framework.... Built up out of the commonalities shared by different experiences, these frameworks are referred to as ‘schemas’” (2000, 95). Cognitive psychologists suggest that schemas operate widely in our everyday lives, acting as scripts to generate typical patterns of behavior in familiar situations. Noting that schema theory has been useful in accounting for features observed in the analysis of various types of music, Widdess discusses schemas in North Indian classical music in particular. He focuses his analysis on one ālāp performance by the sitarist Budhaditya Mukherjee. There, he identifies what he calls “pitch schemas,” which he defines as “the static, quasi-spatial, hierarchical relationships among a group of defined pitches (such as a scale)” and “contour schemas,” which he defines as “a temporal sequence of pitches underlying, and repeatedly embellished or varied in, a group of melodic phrases” (2011, 194). He also notes that the process of vistār itself is a schema (206–07). In this article, I focus on the North Indian semi-classical genre, ṭhumrī. As a “semi- classical” genre (as opposed to the fully classical genres khyāl and dhrupad), ṭhumrī is not bound by the strict rules concerning rāg that apply to its classical counterparts. Rather, 4 When I was learning to sing Indian classical music, this overall pattern would inform not only the pieces my teacher taught me, but even the way she structured my lessons. We would start with long, slow exercises focusing on middle Sa, then explore lower register, and then start a series of exercises which reached ever higher notes while increasing in speed and complexity. By learning in this way, this overall structural progression came to seem perfectly natural to me. 3 Formulas and the Building Blocks of Ṭhumrī Style musicians often talk about the flexibility and freedom permitted in the genre. Nevertheless, many of the schemas and “compositional principles” that Widdess identifies in classical genres also operate in the semi-classical ṭhumrī. Vistār, for example, informs the development of most ṭhumrī performances, though it occurs in a less explicit way than in ālāps such as the one that Widdess analyzes. In ṭhumrī, vistār is usually telescoped so as to occur relatively quickly, it rarely involves any exploration of the register below madhya Sa (the middle tonic) and it sometimes does not structure the whole performance, instead only featuring in certain sections. In addition, ṭhumrī performances are structured by a large-scale formal schema, which dictates the order of musical events in a ṭhumrī performance. Figure 1 is a summary of the structural units that make up ṭhumrī’s overall form, showing the different structural options available to performers. In a performance of ṭhumrī, the performer might follow the arrows along any possible course. This diagram indicates the flexibility inherent in schematic organization: certain events may be missed out, while others may be repeated, extended or shortened. In addition to these two large-scale schemas, other pre-existing constraints on performances of ṭhumrī include the composition, which is a pre-existing melody, the typical style of ornamentation expected in the genre and the rāg and tāl of the performance. It is not only in their use of relatively fixed compositions and in the presence of large- scale structural principles that North Indian classical performances display evidence of advance planning. In addition to this, musicologists have also drawn attention to the large amount of memorized and rehearsed musical material that North Indian classical musicians use in apparently improvised portions of their performances. Stephen Slawek, for instance, has described improvisation in North Indian classical music as a combination of memorized patterns, material based on pre-existing models and material produced by learned, generative “programs” (1998, 363). Widdess and Nooshin, too, have drawn attention to the frequent use 4 Analytical Approaches To World Music 2.1 (2012) Figure 1. The structure of a ṭhumrī performance. Glossary of terms Ālāp: An unmetered introductory passage, concluding when the tabla enters. Sthāyī: The first line of the composition, consisting of a set of lyrics and an approximate melodic outline. Bol banāo: Passages which use the words of the composition in various melodic settings, designed to